2.0L 4-cylinder engine, a low-annoyance horn with exterior lights that indicate when the vehicle is honking, sliding doors with entry step and grab handles, transparent roof panel (with shade), independently controlled rear air conditioning with a grape phenol-coated air filter, breathable, antimicrobial, environmentally friendly and easy-to-clean seat fabric that simulates the look and feel of leather; overhead reading lights for passengers and floor lighting to help locate belongings, a mobile charging station for passengers that includes a 12V electrical outlet and two USB plugs, a six-way adjustable driver’s seat that features both recline and lumbar adjustments, even with a partition installed; standard driver’s navigation and telematics systems; front and rear-seat occupant curtain airbags, as well as seat-mounted airbags for the front row; standard traction control and Vehicle Dynamic Control (VDC), lights that alert other road users that taxi doors are opening.

Needless to say, this little darb is controversial. Consider, if you will, Greater New York Taxi Association v. New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, which apparently has now gone as far as it can:

New York’s plan for a new fleet of cabs from Nissan Motor Co. is legal, an appeals court ruled, overturning a judge who said the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission overstepped its authority by requiring owners to buy a specific vehicle.

The so-called Taxi of Tomorrow program is a “legally appropriate response to the agency’s statutory obligation to produce a 21st-century taxicab consistent with the broad interests and perspectives that the agency is charged with protecting,” Justice David B. Saxe wrote [this week] for the appeals court in Manhattan.

Nissan won a contract in 2011 valued at $1 billion over 10 years to supply more than 15,000 minivans with sliding doors, more luggage space and airbags in the back, for the city’s taxi fleet. The commission in September 2012 designated the Nissan NV200 as the official “Taxi of Tomorrow” and required owners of medallions, which confer the right to operate yellow cabs in New York, to buy the $29,700 vehicles.

What does Hizzoner think of this?

Mayor Bill De Blasio, who received more than $200,000 in taxi-industry donations during his campaign, said before taking office that he opposed the plan because not all cabs would be wheelchair-accessible. The proposal calls for about 2,000 of the taxis to be fitted for disabled riders.

But this, too, had apparently been settled:

U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels ruled in December 2011 that the commission subjects disabled people who use wheelchairs and scooters to discrimination in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in New York overturned Daniels’ ruling in June 2012 and found that the act doesn’t obligate the commission to require taxi owners to provide access for disabled people.

It seems to me that we could have avoided all this, or most of it anyway, by forcing Ford to keep building the Crown Victoria.

Nissan, perhaps due to rubbing up against corporate cousin Renault for all these years, always seems to have a weird mix of genuinely handsome and downright fugly vehicles. I drive a 14-year-old Infiniti sedan which I think is at least acceptable-looking (apart from a really dumb aftermarket spoiler), especially considering the atrocities that have been vended in this size class in recent years in the name of fuel economy/aerodynamics/designer perversity. On the other side of the divide is the Juke utelet, of which Car and Driver said: “There are no logical reasons for it to look the way it does, so clearly drawn without conventional aesthetic considerations in mind.” And they liked it.

On the basis that you should be able to make this fine judgment call on your own, here’s the new QX80, as seen at the New York auto show:

No amount of ethanol could persuade me that this thing is desirable. (Your mileage, of course, may vary.) Then again, the driver only has to look at the inside of it, except when refueling — which, given the size of this thing, he’ll be doing rather frequently.

Yesterday I answered another question at Yahoo!, this one having to do with continuously-variable transmissions, and somewhere therein I said this:

CVTs (such as the Jatcos used by Nissan, which owns most of the company) behave differently than ordinary slushboxes, and J. Random Goober, confronted with rising engine noise and a stock-still tach, goes completely to pieces.

This morning, having been notified that I’d been awarded Best Answer, I returned to the page and discovered that Yahoo! had stuck a link under “Random Goober.” Curiosity won out, and this is what I saw:

Then again, maybe I should have. If everybody actually shows up to work, the parking lot will be awash in Nissan products: apart from my Infiniti, you’ll find a Frontier pickup, a Maxima, and two — sometimes three — Altimas. (El Jefe has, or at least had for several years, the massive Armada SUV, and I’ve seen him in a Z.) Only Chevy comes close. I’m guessing this is because none of us, El Jefe included, are getting rich.

Beginning in September, Certified Pre-Owned Nissan LEAF vehicles will be backed by the company to provide years of quality and performance at a great value.

In addition to the existing 8-year/100,000 mile battery warranty coverage protecting against defects in materials and workmanship, and 5 year/60,000 mile coverage for battery capacity loss below 9 bars of capacity as shown by the vehicle’s battery capacity level gauge, Nissan will extend the EV system and powertrain warranty coverage to 7 years or 100,000 miles.

All warranties, of course, are Whichever Comes First.

The battery gauge has 12 bars, but this does not necessarily mean that capacity eventually drops to 75 percent; if I’ve learned nothing else as the owner of a Nissan-built vehicle, it’s that the gauge calibrations, other than speedo/tach, are more arbitrary than linear.

Nissan revealed the all-new X-Trail, which will be sold stateside as the Rogue. Female drivers rejoiced, while male car shoppers thought to themselves: Am I comfortable enough with my sexuality to like this?

It’s not as bizarre as the Juke, but scarcely anything is as bizarre as the Juke. Still, I continue to maintain that a Real Man™ drives what he damn well pleases. Were I buying in this class, I’d probably rather have a Mazda CX-5, which is similarly devoid of the sort of boy-racer styling cues that DeMuro suggests, possibly tongue-in-cheek, that the lads covet.

There are no logical reasons for it to look the way it does, so clearly drawn without conventional aesthetic considerations in mind. And its 1.6-liter turbo four is an overachiever, imbuing this automotive non sequitur with the verve to match its shape. There’s not a cynical bolt or negative bead of adhesive in the Juke’s batrachian body.

The online version of this same half-paragraph is a lot less scintillating:

There are no logical reasons for it to look the way it does; its aesthetics are so clearly drawn without concern for what critics would think. Its 1.6-liter turbo four is an overachiever, imbuing this automotive non sequitur with the verve to match its shape. There’s not a cynical bolt or bead of adhesive in the Juke’s spunky, amphibian body.

I have to assume that someone in the Web department choked on “batrachian,” and that’s a shame, unless you’re Miss Piggy.

(Title from this recording, a copy of which I have owned for close to forty years.)

Today I went to verify that I love the 2013 Nissan Rogue which I got to know as a rental on two long business trips. The salesman thought I’d save a lot of money if I bought the 2012 because it [was] essentially unchanged. I told him no, so he went to retrieve the car I asked for so I could try out the equipment I wanted and he brought back a 2012 for me to test drive.

Perhaps this was his way of proving that the ’13 was not so different from the ’12, inasmuch as he couldn’t tell them apart himself.

But no, that’s giving the fellow too much credit:

I didn’t stay to hash it out because I had to leave when he referred to my fatness. (Yes he did.) (The one absolutely unlivable thing about the Rogue is that it has crappy fabric like a reusable grocery bag on the door handles and console cover when I was explaining that my current car has that and it’s a problem with hand prints and wear, he said something like “Larger people like you and me have special problems and we need a lot of room to maneuver around.” Dude, I might be fat but I’m not so fat that I rub the fabric off of car doors.)

Way to go with the synthetic empathy, chump.

How long do we have before dealer-franchise laws are yanked and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down? Ten, fifteen years?

Funny thing: the first ads for Infiniti, which wouldn’t show you anything so gauche as an actual car, are now better remembered than the cars they failed to show. (In fact, apparently they’re so well remembered that no one has bothered to post them to YouTube.) Eventually Nissan figured out that they ought to show a car once in a while, even if the message was muddled otherwise.

Mazda, however, hasn’t had a really memorable TV spot since the old rotary days. I’m not sure what to think of this one, but I definitely approve the music (and the musicians).

Not a place on the map, but a fact of life. Last time I took Gwendolyn in for a spa day, the techs declared that one engine mount and one transmission mount were not long for this world. That was 1600 miles ago. As usual with stuff like this, there’s not going to be much change from a $1000 bill.

Still, what’s the alternative? Ditch her and buy someone else’s problems? It is a fact of life that no one ever traded in a car because it was running too well.

Not that you were going to or anything, but if you pointed at my car’s dashboard and asked me “What’s the least-accurate display here?” I’d tell you, without hesitation, that it’s the gas gauge: the last time it bottomed out, the subsequent refill took just under 15 gallons — for a 70-liter (18.5-gallon) tank.

When the mercury hits the levels we’ve seen in recent days it’s inevitable — someone will post a photo of their car thermometer on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. But how accurate are they?

“They’re parked on hot blacktop; there’s going to be residual heat from just the engine itself, the car may not be moving,” said Bill Linsenmayer with AAA Ohio.

He estimates they’re about 5-10 degrees off from the official temperature measured by the National Weather Service.

Which is specious, unless you happen to be driving past the official National Weather Service weather station. In Oklahoma City, you’re not; it’s tucked away into a corner of Will Rogers World Airport. Out where I live, just off the heat island that is Penn Square Mall, being five to ten degrees off is routine.

Besides, Nissan thought of these objections years ago, and set a delay circuit into the HVAC system I have. This time of year, it’s typically in the middle 80s in my garage at sunrise, and the car’s thermometer will so indicate; if it’s, say, 75 outside, the reading will slowly drop, a degree at a time, until it’s reached 75, somewhere near the mall. (At which time, it’s probably 70 at the airport.) In general, the little display is more accurate than the few remaining time/temperature signs around town: it was 96 degrees yesterday when I passed by a local church that claimed it was 105. (Hellfire and damnation, indeed.) And the only time I’ve ever seen it have problems was when the temperature was about -5, and it kept bouncing between -3 and -4.

Now how Nissan can get climate-control gizmos to do this and yet can’t build an accurate gas gauge to save its Qashqai is beyond me.

Let the record show that (1) I have carried a tire gauge — in fact, the same tire gauge — for about thirty years, and on occasion I bring it to the local tire shop, which will happily verify its accuracy. My car is not quite that old, but it dates to well before the widespread adoption of tire-pressure monitoring systems, which are now mandatory on passenger cars sold in the States. And up to now, I’ve never regretted not having one, but that was before I saw TPMS v2.0:

This neatly solves the one annoying aspect of old-style pencil gauges: you have to stop filling, apply the gauge, start filling again if you’re not up to where you’re supposed to be, lather, rinse, repeat.

Of course, by the time I’m ready for this, I hope I can also get my own in-house nitrogen supply.

The conventional wisdom about Nissan’s VQ engine is that the greater the displacement, the less appealing the sound of it: a Car and Driver scribe once asserted that the 3.7-liter version buzzes “like a blender set to ‘frappé’.” (The 3.0 version bolted into my car doesn’t sound bad at all.) Still, even if they stroked and bored it into the 4-plus range, it’s hard to imagine it making noises like this:

And then there’s the latest Merc’ Hammer. Yes it now has enough torque to strangle a humpback-whale, but at what cost? Even at idle, the old 6.2L engine burbles like the borborygmi of Cthulhu, and when prodded with a violent downshift barks like a stabbed Allosaur.

“It’s a green car, affordable car, small displacement, high local content,” [Carlos] Ghosn said of the Datsun. “It’s going to be a generous car.”

What it’s not going to be is an American car; there are apparently no plans to offer anything branded Datsun in the states.

Still, it gives me an opportunity to step up the Mr Humble game. In the past, people who seemed impressed for some reason that I drive an Infiniti would be told that “Oh, it’s just a Nissan.” Now I can give them “Oh, it’s just a Datsun.”

Contemporary cars have a panoply of warning lights, some pretty standard, some model-specific. My first Mazda 626, for instance, had a warning light to tell you if one of the exterior lights was burned out; this was apparently decontented away in the next generation. One I’ve never seen, though, was Nissan’s FLOOR TEMP warning, which is explained thusly:

The thing that really put the malaise into the Malaise Era was the inability of the automotive industry to meet US federal and (in the case of cars sold in California) state exhaust-emission regulations without crippling the vehicles (whether this inability was due to Naderite anti-progress bomb-throwers infesting the government or corporate mismanagement and the over-reliance on lobbying to fend off emissions regulations is your subject to debate). While Honda’s CVCC engines managed to beat the tailpipe test without the use of the early, incredibly inefficient catalytic converters, just about everybody else had to bolt a super-restrictive and surface-of-sun-temperature cat onto the exhaust. On low, sporty vehicles that didn’t have a good location for the catalytic converter, an overheating cat could set the car’s interior on fire. Nissan’s solution to this was the FLOOR TEMP indicator light, which used a temperature sensor near the catalytic converter to warn the driver to slow the hell down.

My primary Malaise Era ride was a ’75 Toyota Celica, which, in 49-state mode, lacked a cat altogether. (Despite the absence of the oft-derided device, minor tweaking of the rudimentary engine controls enabled this car to pass — barely — California emissions in 1988.) There was a lamp on the dash labeled EXH. TEMP, which I assume would have served the same purpose; I never saw it glowing.

The Italians, apparently, took a more direct approach:

Fiats, Ferraris, and (I’m pretty sure) Alfa Romeos of the late 1970s got this lovely and equally confusing “SLOW DOWN” idiot light to warn drivers of overheating catalytic converters; at least this light gave the driver some idea of the remedy for the problem. Some Fiats and British Leyland cars got a similarly cryptic (yet technically more accurate) “CATALYST” idiot light. Perhaps a really big idiot light reading “CATALYTIC CONVERTER OVERHEATING — SLOW YOUR ASS DOWN OR PERISH IN FLAMES!” would have been best.

They couldn’t do something like that today; why, that message is just as long as one of those wicked text messages and would thereby almost certainly constitute Deadly Distraction.